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'Goofing Off' To Get Ahead?
theodp writes "His old day job at Gawker entailed calling BS on tech's high-and-mighty, but Ryan Tate still found things to like about Silicon Valley. In The 20% Doctrine, Tate explores how tinkering, goofing off, and breaking the rules at work can drive success in business. If you're lucky, your boss may someday find Tate's book in his or her conference schwag bag and be inspired enough by the tales of skunkworks projects at both tech (Google, Flickr, pre-Scott Thompson Yahoo) and non-tech (Bronx Academy of Letters, Huffington Post, Thomas Keller Restaurant Group) organizations to officially condone some form of 20% time at your place of work. In the meantime, how do you manage to find time to goof off to get ahead?"
In the meantime, how do you manage to find time to goof off to get ahead?"
By always looking busy, never telling the manager what I'm working on until it's done, and reporting I'm capable of doing less work than I actually am. Then, when I exceed expectations, my manager loves me, and when I deliver shiny new toys, the rest of the department loves me.
That said, in many other countries and corporate environments, tinkering would be encouraged... but in most jobs here in the good ol'US of A... you're supposed to be just smart enough to do your job, and not so smart you realize your manager's a moron, your company is unethical, and your coworkers make more than you.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
With technical workers, the management's job is to run interference against external distractions and help remove roadblocks. Your team should be largely self-organizing and self-motivating, such that you don't have to watch over them. Deviation from this is generally a failure in hiring, a failure in management, or both.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I think the whole point is that it doesn't have to be particularly focused. The 20% might be spent on something innovative, on personal study of no direct benefit to the company, or it might be spent on catching up on some background tasks, beneficial to the company even though it doesn't contribute directly to the bottom line or move the little bars in some Gantt chart along. The time should be spent on something more or less related to the business, but the employee gets to decide how that time is spent, without supervision. Even if nothing of value gets produced by that employee in that one day a week, it can still make him a better motivated, smarter, more effective and less burnt-out employee.
It wouldn't work for everyone but I have seen it work for a lot more people than you'd think. At the end of the day you might find the benefits to the employees for whom it does work far outweigh the loss in productivity for those few who will really do nothing of any value whatsoever. If you find yourself at that stage, for gods sake do not try and optimize the scheme by introducing some supervision, detailed reporting, or a list of "acceptable" was to spend that time. Instead of killing the whole scheme that way, accept the loss in view of the larger gains.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Back in the day, Thomas Watson made the case for THINK-ing: "And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter -- thinking -- because it's hard work for people to think, And, as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said recently, 'all of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think.'"
I attended a conference about how Google engineers work.
You are right about the 20%: it's not encouraged anymore, but it seems that you can ask for it.
Google manages people with Excel, and managers rate them every year (trying to fire 5% of their employees, aka the underperformers), it's a very tough environment.
I realized that the 20% was used to buy social peace, because Google's culture is internally very competitive, and not about goofing off at all !
Given that the 20% are not pushed anymore, the turn-over will probably increase (and it will not be limited to the underperformers, but the brilliant minds who will prefer a less competitive environment).
I believe that innovation stopped when they closed Google Labs.
This sent a message to their developers: if you have a good idea, it's better to create your own startup and sell it to Google.
And I'm sure that's what happens now !
I'm pretty sure his statement was sarcasm.
Unfortunately, I have seen businesses who believe it to be true. They don't live by the ideas of equal pay for the same position, and appropriately adjusted yearly increases. They'll keep an employee at their starting pay, and give token increases if the employee isn't completely burnt out but threatens to move on.
I watched at one place, where a 5 year employee was still making his starting salary (approx $40k/yr), although he had increased responsibility significantly. New hires for the same role were being brought in much higher (approx $75k/yr). There was a contractual obligation to not discuss salaries, although it did happen.
They worked him til he burnt out, then terminated him on fictional grounds. My state allows termination of an employee for anything, or as joked, you can be fired because the boss doesn't like your shoes.
The new hires in that situation won't last long. I didn't keep up with them, so I don't know if they're still working with that company. I know their 40 hour week became a minimum 60 hours, and on a whim senior management would demand people work "until it's done", even if it resulted in people sleepily typing the wrong things and making bigger mistakes. Like, "oops, I meant fsck, not mkfs".
Most likely, the new hires at $75k will be laid off for another fictional reason, when they find some others willing to do the job for less money.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Short answer: Supervisors, which, contrary to popular belief, is not management.
Long answer: If you're operating within the same time span as your employees, meaning your deadlines are their deadlines and vice-versa, you're not management or, worse yet, you're not managing.
A supervisor has the job you're describing. They usually are a former veteran in the field, someone with sufficient domain knowledge in the industry to know when an employee is doing their job, when an employee that's capable of doing the job is sluffing off, or when an employee is simply incapable of doing the job regardless of how much you incentivize them. A supervisor isn't formally trained on how to supervise - chances are, they've been supervised long enough where they've seen what works from their predecessors, what doesn't, and guide their approach accordingly. In military terms, they'd be an NCO (Corporal, Sergeant, etc.). How much latitude they have, and how they motivate or monitor the employees, is defined by management, depending on business needs and corporate culture.
Management, meanwhile, is a formally defined skill with lots and lots of science behind it. Management's job is to provide differing levels of strategic direction for the company, depending on time span and objectives. The purpose of management is to make sure that each assignment provided to staff is part of a larger goal dictated by business needs and that each assignment is broken down and compartmentalized into appropriate-sized units, as dictated by the capabilities of each staff member or group. So, for example, a software architect might be assigned a multi-year software design project, while a starting coder would receive something fairly simple, like "Implement function X within the parameters Y specified here," with a deadline (implicit or explicit) of at most a week. To accomplish this, systems must be created, maintained, and monitored to ensure that there is consistent, positive output from the start of a project (or set of projects) to the end of one. When management does its job well, predictable, sensible output is the result (see recent iterations of Ubuntu and Windows, at least post-Vista). When management does its job poorly, the systems break down (see Longhorn, Apple in the '90s before Jobs reclaimed the throne, pretty much anything GM has done in the past 40 years). In military terms, management would be your officers (Lieutenants to Generals, depending on branch, of course).
Now, getting to what you were discussing, yes, it's true that Slashdot has more than its fair share of self-entitled 2%ers (or people that wish they were 2%ers and want to be treated accordingly) that think they should be given a six-figure paycheck, a well stocked lab, and a fridge full of caffeine so they can change the world, and view any failure to accommodate that vision as "poor management". In reality, that might be the start of an effective system of production, or it might not - depends on who's working for you and what you're doing. However, as GM learned the hard way in the '60s and '70s (and Toyota learned by studying Deming, who knew better as far back as the '30s), even "unskilled" labor benefits from frequent job reassignments, variety in work, and occasional moments to stop and think about the bigger picture. This doesn't mean letting the employees turn the company into a re-enactment of the "Lord of the Flies" (or whatever you want to call the excesses of the now-legendary Dot Com bubble 'companies'), but it does mean treating them as stakeholders that should be interested in the success of the company and whose opinions should be respected and rewarded when they lead to improvement and growth.
From a management (or even supervisory) standpoint, this means that, if your system calls on lots of yelling, screaming, and berating to get employees to do something they don't want to do, your system is going to only return just enough to avoid further yelling, screaming, and
Seriously?
I'll admit I don't work in Mountain View, and I'm not ignorant enough to assume that my experience in one Google office speaks for the entire company, but this nonsense about Google's work environment, apparently deduced from a fucking conference (did I read that right?), has got to stop.
First, a few facts. Yes, "Googlers" bitch about things-- but that's to be expected in any work environment. No, it isn't perfect and unicorns don't spring up when ever you're stressed out, but all things considered it is an amazing place to work. Aside from the well documented perks are some other rarely discussed things that make the org special. It is a remarkably flat organization (I work outside of the US, but I can, and have, openly contradicted/disagreed with the head of our country, with no ill effect). With extremely rare exception the senior management are all, at the very least, extremely competent. The aforementioned head of the country has his flaws, but the man knows the company, knows the products, has an amazing attention to detail and not even his worst enemy would claim he isn't damn good at what he does.
If I need a tool to get a job done-- Google just fucking gives it to me. I wanted a new laptop, I had one in 5 minutes. I wanted a reliable way to get internet while going out for a client meeting, had it in 2 minutes. No one logged this crap-- in fact, the person who gave it to me asked a few weeks later if I could return it at some point. My wife has to compile a business case, call the Prime Minister, and check with the CEO of Lenovo before her org will think of giving her a laptop (which will almost invariably be a piece of shit), I returned mine because I wanted a better GPU (took a week to be delivered).
Yes it is a group of high achievers (what do you expect?), and yes it can be difficult to get ahead/be noticed in such an environment, but progress in your career is not a given, it depends on your ability and while Google isn't perfect at this, it is as close as I've seen to a "meritocracy".
Again, I'm not here to shill for the company. It isn't perfect, and they've not mastered a lot of these things (promotion cycles are a bit wonky, politics certainly do exist, etc), but the levels of it are SO marginal compared to anywhere else I've worked, and I genuinely feel that the company cares about my well being. In sum, it's a fantastic place to work-- and your conference is full of shit.
One last thing. This is the first org I've worked at that values engineering above all else. Engineers have perks that I don't have (though I can jump through hoops to get them), and in general, are held up as the pinnacle of the company. I've worked for other tech firms where the engineers were treated like absolute garbage, and no one cared at all about what it is they did/do. It's refreshing, even for a non-engineer, to see an emphasis on the people who build the products. If you think that's a terrible environment, well, do tell me where you work and I'll consider applying.